The Belgian surrealist painters of the early 20th century were magicians who discovered an alternate universe where everyday objects played unexpected roles and where humdrum everyday life was given a secret meaning, albeit a different one to each viewer. For example, Delville’s depiction of Professor Enigmus goes well beyond mere canvas and paint when it reveals a magician who lives in a house of beef liver hue, big and dark, the kind only a Belgian magician can build and only at the end of a street, adjacent to the vast park of the night. From another angle though, it must have the front-door lights on even if no one’s ever seen entering and no one ever dims the sunlight over the night-hugging sycamores.
The inside of the house is rumored to be furnished with antique pieces of mystery, equipped with a tunnel to hell and a secret staircase to the moon. Lighting is provided by black candles with black flames for resident who are never seen entering or leaving. Such a big dark house is never vacant, never empty, filled up as it is with the night seeping in through the cracks and with it the armies of the night waiting with their rifles loaded. Waiting and telling jokes about the tales under the bed. Waiting with their rifles cocked…
There is so much worth waiting for. The promise itself is the magic, the fulfillment the viewer is granted standing there in front of the house and marveling at the alliance of night and day. And at all the progeny that issue from it:
There’s a permanent black mass in progress in the shuttered parlor, celebrated by the magician’s special creatures, priestesses with snakes for arms and turtles for lips, and by gladiators with elephant trunks between their thighs.
As part of the ritual, pink scallop shells start squealing with delight on the terracotta floor when a cavalry rides through the front portico.
After the unholy communion there’s the massage of oysters on the tongue, and the massacre of candles by armored angels flapping steel wings, the crucifixion of curses and blessings, the prayer of skeletal cats swimming from room to room with coloratura skips and hops in a stream of cold salmon semen… The list is endless.
A big dark house is never empty very long, it gets stuffed with the restless silence of the nigh and the viewer’s impatient desire to know…
That is when Professor Enigmus assembles an execution squad and has himself shot.
He ingests the bullets and passes them in a big five-poster bed, the extra poster being a gibbet where he can hang himself in case he’s constipated, feeling unreal.
That’s how he gives birth to his creatures such as angels defecating into a large silver salver held high by faithful lizards, bashful murderers hoping to get caught with a bleeding knife in hand and all those other inhabitants of that real world assembled in surrealist paintings.
The rest of the time Professor Enigmus lives in a modest hotel room at the other end of town, a big house that's never dark; it’s filled with electric light in addition to flesh and blood for sale, yet the tables are often empty. Sometimes a poet or an artist might walk through with the night bundled up under his arm. Maybe a cat, too. With the moon between its jaws.
Arles, the yellow flares of Arles, at the other end of the known world. Another world.
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